18/12/2024

Incels

Since 2014, multiple mass killings have been perpetrated by self-identified incels, as well as other instances of violence or attempted violence. After the 2018 Toronto van attack, incel communities have been repeatedly criticised by researchers and the media for being misogynistic, encouraging violence, spreading extremist views, and radicalising their members.

An incel (/ˈɪnsɛl/ IN-sel; an abbreviation of "involuntary celibate"), or sometimes incels, can be defined as a person associated with one or more of the following: an ideology, a mostly online subculture, an identity, a mostly online community, and/or a movement, that is characterised by public displays of sexual and/or romantic frustration.

plural Incels: a person (usually a man) who regards himself or herself as being involuntarily celibate and typically expresses extreme resentment and hostility toward those who are sexually active.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Incels also believe that people seeking a romantic or sexual partner participate in a cruel, mercenary, and Darwinian sexual selection, wherein incels are genetically unfit and where women hold an advantage for reasons ranging from Feminism to the use of cosmetics. Incels may attribute their lack of sexual success to factors such as shyness, sex-segregated work environments, and commonly believe that the only thing more important than looks in improving a man's eligibility as a prospective partner is wealth.

Some incels justify their beliefs based on the works of fringe social psychologist Brian Gilmartin and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson. Estimates of the size of incel communities during 2018-2019 varied, and ranged from the thousands, to tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands. More recently, a statistical analysis of the largest incel forum shows that only a few hundred accounts made up the vast majority of forum posts during all of 2021 and most of 2022.

Many discussions in incel-themed forums are characterised by hatred, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and self-loathing, ethnocentrism, a sense of entitlement to sex, and the endorsement of violence against women and sexually active people. Incel communities became more extremist and focused on violence from the late 2010s. This has been attributed to factors including influences from overlapping online hate groups and the rise of the alt-right (see: Faux Nationalism).

Beginning in 2018 and into the 2020s, the incel ideology has been described by North American governments and researchers as a terrorism threat, and law enforcement have issued warnings about the subculture. A January 2020 report by the Texas Department of Public Safety warned that incels were an "emerging domestic terrorism threat" that "could soon match, or potentially eclipse, the level of lethalness demonstrated by other domestic terrorism types".

Dr. John Horgan, a psychology professor at Georgia State University who in 2019 received a $250,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to study the incel subculture, explained why the incel ideology equates to terrorism:

the fact that incels are aspiring to change things up in a bigger, broader ideological sense, that's, for me, what make it a classic example of terrorism. That's not saying all incels are terrorists. But violent incel activity is, unquestionably, terrorism in my view.

The UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate ("CCDH") published a report during 2022 about an active r/incels offshoot incel forum that posted about rape every 29 minutes during their study period, and used the word "kill" 1,181 times in one month. 89% of forum users during the study period expressed that they support rape in general. According to the report, some posters on the forum try to normalise the idea of child rape, and more than half the total forum during their study period supported pedophilia.

Elliot Rodger was born in London, UK, and moved to the United States with his parents at age five. He was raised in Los Angeles. His father is British filmmaker (Assistant director, The Hunger Games 2012) Peter Rodger, his paternal grandfather photo-journalist George Rodger. His mother is a Malaysian Chinese research assistant for a film company. Rodger had a YouTube account, and a blog titled "Elliot Rodger's Official Blog", through which he expressed loneliness and rejection.

During his attack, Rodger killed six people, all of whom were University of California, Santa Barbara students, with 14 others sustaining injuries, seven by gunfire and seven who were hit by Rodger's vehicle.

Rodger began his attacks at his apartment on Seville Road, where he killed three men by stabbing them multiple times. Two of the victims were confirmed to be Rodger's roommates according to an apartment lease, while police were investigating whether the third was also a resident or visiting the apartment on the night of the killings.

After the stabbings, Rodger purchased coffee at a coffee shop and at around 8:30 p.m., he was seen working on his laptop in his car in the parking lot of his apartment building. He uploaded his "Retribution" video at 9:17 and sent his manifesto e-mail at 9:18.

Rodger drove to the Alpha Phi sorority house at Embarcadero del Norte and Segovia Road near UCSB, where he knocked on the front door for a few minutes. After no one answered the door, he then began shooting people nearby. Two women were killed and a third was injured. Rodger began driving again. He fired into an unoccupied coffee shop on Pardall Road, then several times into a delicatessen; a man was struck seven times and killed. He exchanged gunfire with three sheriff's deputies, and was shot in the hip. At 9:35, police found Rodger dead inside his car from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head. In the car were three pistols, knives, six empty ten-round magazines, and 548 rounds of unspent ammunition.

Tomorrow is the day of retribution, the day in which I will have my revenge against humanity, against all of you. For the last eight years of my life, ever since I hit puberty, I've been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires all because girls have never been attracted to me. Girls gave their affection, and sex, and love to other men but never to me. I'm 22 years old and I'm still a virgin. I've never even kissed a girl. I've been through college for two and a half years, more than that actually, and I'm still a virgin. It has been very torturous. College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and pleasure. Within those years, I've had to rot in loneliness. It's not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It's an injustice, a crime, because ... I don't know what you don't see in me. I'm the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman.

"Transcript of video linked to Santa Barbara mass shooting". CNN. May 28, 2014.

In his manifesto, My Twisted World he wrote that being of mixed race made him "different from the normal fully white kids". On one online forum, he said that he opposed interracial dating and made several posts regarding African-American, South Asian and East Asian people, stating that seeing men of these ethnic groups socialising with white women "makes you want to quit life". In one online post, Rodger wrote:

Full Asian men are disgustingly ugly and white girls would never go for you. You're just butthurt that you were born as an Asian piece of shit, so you lash out by linking these fake pictures. You even admit that you wish you were half white. You'll never be half-white and you'll never fulfill your dream of marrying a white woman. I suggest you jump off a bridge.

Rodger, Elliot. My Twisted World.

Rodger made a racially motivated comments regarding another boy, outlining some of his manifesto plans:

How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. On the day before the Day of Retribution, I will start the First Phase of my vengeance: Silently killing as many people as I can around Isla Vista by luring them into my apartment through some form of trickery.

Rodger, Elliot. My Twisted World.

Rodger stated in his manifesto that, in his ideal world, he would:

quarantine all [women] in concentration camps. At these camps, the vast majority of the female population will be deliberately starved to death. That would be an efficient and fitting way to kill them all off ... I would have an enormous tower built just for myself ... and gleefully watch them all die.

He said that he planned to kill his half-brother and stepmother, but was not mentally prepared to kill his father. According to his family's attorney and a family friend, Rodger had seen multiple therapists since he was eight years old, but the attorney said he had never been formally diagnosed with a mental illness. He was diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, an autism spectrum disorder, in 2007.

Newsreport.

After turning 18, Rodger began rejecting mental health care and became increasingly isolated. Family friend Dale Launer said that he counseled Rodger on approaching women, but that Rodger did not follow the advice; Launer also commented that when he met Rodger at eight or nine, "I could see then that there was something wrong with him ... looking back now he strikes me as someone who was broken from the moment of conception."

Elliot Rodger will not be forgotten.

Nikolas Cruz, mass shooter who killed 17 people. Cruz recieved 34 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Christopher Sean "Chris" Harper-Mercer was enrolled in the introductory composition class where he shot his victims. He was born in Torrance, California to Ian Mercer, an Englishman, and Laurel Harper, a Black American woman. His parents separated before he was born, and agreed to share legal custody in their divorce. This never went through however, as Harper-Mercer spent his entire life living with his mother, and hadn't seen his father since they had moved to Oregon some two years before the shooting.

Harper-Mercer's ethnicity was described as "White" by the medias.

Harper-Mercer joined the U.S. Army in 2008, but was discharged after five weeks for his failure to meet the "minimum administrative standards" of basic training. Officials linked to the investigation said that he was discharged as the result of a suicide attempt, but Army officials did not comment on this. In 2009, he graduated from Switzer Learning Center, a school for teenagers with learning disabilities or emotional issues. Laurel Harper was reportedly protective of him and tried to shield him from various perceived annoyances.

Harper-Mercer maintained several Internet accounts, including one in which he described himself as mixed race. Media reports said he had an e-mail address linked to an account on a BitTorrent website. The last upload on the account, three days before the Umpqua shooting, was a documentary on the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. According to the Los Angeles Times, unnamed law enforcement sources described him as a "hate-filled" man with antireligious leanings and long-term mental-health issues.

There were fourteen legally purchased weapons kept in the apartment, and Harper-Mercer's mother wrote online that she always kept full magazines in Glock pistols and an AR-15 rifle inside. The two often spent time together at shooting ranges, but Harper-Mercer was otherwise extremely isolated. Harper-Mercer had been placed on scholastic probation at Umpqua Community College for falling below a C average. A UCC tuition bill due on October 6 noted that Harper-Mercer owed $2,021.

Harper-Mercer killed nine people:

On the day of the shooting, Harper-Mercer gave a survivor numerous writings showing he had studied mass killings, including the 2014 killing spree at Isla Vista, California. These expressed his sexual frustration as a virgin, animosity toward Black men, and a lack of fulfillment in his isolated life. In them, he said "Other people think I'm crazy, but I'm not. I'm the sane one," and that he would be "welcomed in Hell and embraced by the devil.". He also reportedly admired the WDBJ shooting perpetrator for the fame received, and wrote that:

A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day.

Although Harper-Mercer had substantial mental illness, he had never been involuntarily committed (which under federal and state law prohibits a person from purchasing a gun). Harper-Mercer was therefore able to pass a background check and bought a .380 semiautomatic handgun.

On May 20, 2020, a shooting took place at the Westgate Entertainment District. The gunman was identified as Armando Hernandez Jr, a 20-year-old man from Peoria. He filmed the attack with a cellphone in his left hand while shooting with his right. Some news reports claimed that he identified as an incel and that he was inspired by Elliot Rodger as he stated in his police interview that viewed Rodger as "a god", and that he was deliberately targeting romantic couples. Hernandez grew up in a mixed race family.

Hernandez reportedly also filmed himself driving to the mall that day, showing his guns in the backseat, according to local outlet West Valley View.

Hello, my name is Armando Junior Hernandez, and I’m gonna be the shooter of Westgate 2020, he said. This is to get back at society.

Police said Hernandez had planned on killing no less than 10 people that day, according to KPHO-TV, but his weapon jammed.

He would later tell authorities that he committed the crime as a means “to gain respect,” and prosecutors alleged he'd spent three years planning to commit a “mass casualty" event, the West Valley View reported. Hernandez allegedly shared several videos on Snapchat during the rampage that were later circulated on social media. Prosecutors later added that Hernandez wanted 'people to feel the pain that he feels on a daily basis.'. In a police interview Hernandez identified as a "Red", he elaborated this to mean a "Communist".

18/12/2024